Brain Food

Change is hard. Today, you may resolve to procrastinate less at work, only to find yourself browsing Facebook tomorrow, when you should be working on your big presentation.

Luckily, there are tools to make change easier.

Find the bright spots and spread them

One of the challenges we face is that our brains are extraordinarily adept at spotting all possible obstacles to change. So we instantly think things like, “I’ll never stop procrastinating when Facebook is just a click away.”

This can be disheartening.

To overcome this tendency, you need to find and focus on the bright spots: specific situations where you’ve already succeeded in making a positive change.

For example, if you want to stop procrastinating at work, try to identify days when you didn’t procrastinate much at all. What was special about those days?

You might realize that you had a relaxed morning, perhaps meditating a bit before work, which resulted in a calm focus for the whole day.

Now, take those bright spots and spread them around. In this case, you could start meditating every morning, thereby lessening procrastination later in the day.

For more on how to effect change in your life – including why you need to shape your environment to support it – we recommend reading “Switch”, by Chip and Dan Heath.

Switch provides simple yet effective tools for implementing changes.

Don’t have time to read the whole book? Read or listen to a powerful short from this book in just 15 minutes on Blinkist: